Nowadays Instagram hardly needs any introduction. It has become a critical component of many brands’ social presence and marketing strategies, especially for building large, engaged audiences.
If your Instagram presence isn’t as impactful as you’d like, it might be time to dig deep and adopt a new strategy. One successful route to explore is improving your Instagram techniques for gaining authentic, organic followers on the platform. The greater your reach, the more authentic followers you’re likely to gain.
Instagram, with its continuous updates, always rolls out features and algorithms that favor the more active and interactive accounts. So, buying followers that are not authentic and active might give you the numbers on paper, but not the quality of success you want.
So, what makes a successful Instagram following? In this post, we’ll explain that and give you ten tips to get you started.
Let’s get to it!
What makes a successful Instagram Following?
The number of followers on Instagram is meaningless unless it signifies an engaged fan base that makes purchases, goes to landing sites, and advertises your businesses with friends and family.
You know you have a real and successful Instagram following when you grow them organically using different strategies. This can be achieved by building communities, employing user-generated content, favoring interactions in comments, and many more.
This guarantees you would always get successful feedback when you engage in different activities, be it business-related or otherwise with your audience. When you have developed a massive following, at least half of them should be ever ready and active to function with your business.
10 Tips to Get You a Successful Instagram Following
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Now that you understand what a successful following should look like, let’s get into ten tips to get you started.
1. Repurpose your Instagram account
The first step to creating a successful Instagram following is setting up your account the right way. Your entire feed on your Instagram bio should not only represent your brand but do so in a way that would attract a good following.
Without a compelling bio, an acceptable username or profile image, and image captions, you may miss out on some good followers right from the beginning. These elements form the foundation of your Instagram identity and tend to leave a lasting impression on the various visitors to your account.
Use the link in your bio as efficiently as possible to drive potential customers to your website and product pages. Also, ensure your username is search-friendly and easily identified. Stick to short usernames and avoid special characters that don’t reflect your brand image. From top to bottom, your account needs to be repurposed to ensure a good following experience.
2. Create an Instagram Content Calendar
A very common and damning mistake most young brands on the platform make is posting random content. Of course, you will be lucky enough to get followers when you start, but you are bound to lose them or not gain as much when time passes. Either your followers forget why they followed you in the first place or you lose them completely.
The best way to get and keep a successful Instagram following is to maintain a regular posting schedule. To approach this, post a few times a day or a week, depending on your business model. Regardless of your chosen schedule, the most important element is consistency.
Also, figure out the best times to post content for your audience.
This gives you peak engagement levels and maximizes your chances of building a successful Instagram following.
3. Schedule Advanced Posts
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Since posting at peak times gives you the most visibility, engagements, and chances of following, you need to create advanced posts. You can use various social media tools to schedule your posts and program them to be posted at significant periods.
Scheduling brand content creates efficiency in developing marketing strategies and attracting more followers. This not only solves the problem of inconsistency but also keeps you on track with your content ideas and marketing procedures.
4. Avoid fake Instagram followers
Although the natural approach to building your business on the platform is gaining followers, there’s a huge difference between fake and legitimate ones.
Generally, many business accounts attempt to get more follower buy buying fake followers instead of buying real views and followers. For many accounts, this is usually where the problem starts.
Having a bunch of fake inactive followers might give subsequent new organic followers a bad perception of your business. If they come across your account with thousands of followers and no real interactions, they’ll naturally question your account’s credibility.
Superficial Instagram followers can also damage your return on investment. When you buy or add up inactive followers, you won’t get visits to your websites or see many of them purchasing your products. A good number of such followers won’t comment, like, and share your content.
Real followers, on the other hand, will share, like, comment, and engage with your Instagram posts.
5. Learn to implement user-generated content
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When studying how to obtain more Instagram followers, it’s critical to understand the worth of your audience. They aren’t just tools to fulfill your business ideas and profits. They are real people interested in a brand that helps and cares about them.
That’s why the more organic followers you have, the more buyers and potential clients you will have. And one of the best ways to get such a successful Instagram following is by sponsoring user-generated content. This shows that you care, and it would convince other viewers that they have an impact on your business too.
6. Advertise your Instagram on other social media
To gain a successful following, you need a large audience. What better way to assess such an audience than by spreading your reach across other social media platforms? Ensure your Instagram account is displayed on your website and other social networks.
Cross visibility and awareness can easily help you get discovered and access more loyal organic followers. You could add social media links to your website or create a blog to help promote visibility across all your networks, especially on Instagram.
7. Lead conversations
Users can easily interact with photos, videos, and text posts. The catch? Make it as interactive as possible. Instagram cleverly combines all these three content types so people can connect and interact easily. As such, you must initiate conversations to encourage your audience.
People are now reaching out to brands on social platforms to ask questions, starts discussions or make important customer service inquiries. Hence, you should be supportive and interactive on Instagram for your business.
8. Find helpful hashtags
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Hashtags are a sure way to get a successful following on Instagram. The only problem is that many accounts use the wrong ones or misuse them.
To benefit from hashtags, locate the ones that are not too common. Trying to stand out your Instagram content in a pool of other pictures and videos is too much trouble. To make it easy, find and use hashtags that are easy and relatable yet not so popular. You can also create unique, branded hashtags instead.
Never go blindly into the hashtag realm. Know what you’re tagging so you can make a successful Instagram following.
9. Post popularly demanded user content
While this is easier said than done, learning what posts your followers like to see is a good idea. On Instagram, you’ll gradually notice that certain posts perform better than others.
For example, if you’re a fashion brand, provide fashion tips and also encourage your followers to share their experiences and thoughts. This way, you can understand what they enjoy.
Also, be alive to new Instagram trends so you can always upload popular stuff.
10. Use Instagram Analytics
Instagram analytics is the holy grail of your Instagram experience. It makes it simple to benchmark, follow and analyze various filters, captions and posts to see what works best with your audience. You can also analyze your competitors and see what’s working for them and what isn’t.
By examining your real-time progress via Instagram analytics, you can spot inconsistencies within your performance and create solutions to your present and future setbacks. This will help you maximize every Instagram feature and make a successful Instagram following.
Bottom Line
A successful Instagram following is characterized by many sound engagement ideas and diligent work. Avoid taking unnecessary shortcuts and stick with strategies that will benefit you in the long run. Learn to adapt to changes and don’t shy away from interactions, comments, and user-generated content. With these ten tips, you’ll surely gain a successful following just like other big brands out there.
